GitHub's identicons have quickly become an easy and popular way to provide a default profile pic. With the ruby_identicon gem from Chris Branson, it is easy to create identicons in your Ruby app. It provides some customization so you can easily tailor them to your needs.

Ever wondered about the thought process behind the Observer pattern? This blog post from DockYard takes a deep dive into building it out from scratch. Understanding the reasoning behind the patterns we use every day is critical to building complex system, so put your computer science hat on and give this a read!

Like Hubot but don't want to write coffeescript? Lita is a new chat bot written in Ruby and has a very easy to implement plugin architecture. It is easy to set up on Heroku and dead simple to customize. It is a new project so there aren't a lot of plugins for it yet, but I'm sure that will change over the coming weeks. Give it a try today and contribute a plugin to this new ecosystem!

If you're still putting keys in your codebase, shame on you! Storing them in your server's environment configuration makes for a more secure and easier to manage deployment environment, but presents a new challenge in development. Luckily it is a solvable problem thanks to gems like figaro. You can store your development and test configurations it in an environment specific yaml file and put those security concerns behind you.

Learning some of the more advanced features of postgres can help you streamline your code and solve performance problems in ways you probably wouldn't have dreamed of before. This new blog post from fellow Rocketeer Jack Christensen walks you through postgres' writable common table expressions, which you can leverage to wrap up what would have been multiple round-trips to the database into a single request.

Wondering who is processing lots of traffic on Rails apps these days? Netguru compiled a list of the top 10 Rails apps based on data from Alexa. It is a pretty cool read and these companies are definitely worth checking out!

So that's it for this episode of Ruby5. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast and keep yourself up to date. Thanks for listening!